| Over the last several decades,video game has become one of people’s most popular pastimes and most important creative industries in China.The video game industry has significantly changed,and the outbreak of COVID-19 seems to accelerate its development as a new lifestyle and social media.However,little research has focused on Chinese media coverage of video game during this transformation.This study aims to bridge this gap and examine video game coverage in China Daily,a leading English newspaper in China over the last two decades.Based on the analytic framework of media discourse,this study is targeted to explore the news reports on video game,summarize the characteristics and explain the potential causes of discursive transformation over time in the context of history,society and culture in China at different periods.Based on the theory of critical discourse analysis,the analysis consists of two levels:textual analysis and historical-diachronic analysis.The data is news coverage from China Daily published from Jan 1st,2001 to Dec 31st,2020.In the textual analysis,the results on keywords,collocates,information source and modal auxiliary verbs showed distinctive language features in different time periods and indicated the discourse change of news discourse on video game.In the historical-diachronic analysis of culture,economy and politics,the results suggested that China’s social change had great influence on the discourse.Video game was seen as a new technology which brought convenience to people along with telecommunication and internet,although many new articles also mentioned that games with entertainments were harmful to the society or psychology,like alcohols,violent behaviors,and pornographies.As the development of China’s game industry,the focus of news reports shifted to celebrating the benefits and achievements in economy and sports.In the background of COVID-19 pandemic,the notion of online business and virtual reality appeared frequently in the video game coverage.During 2001 to 2020,the change of video game news discourse is reflected in the following aspects:1)the shift in topic focus was“technology-industry-life”;2)the key concepts shifted from game industry and products to the social relationships between individuals in the new era of“In-house”life and cyber society;3)the discourse power shifted from game-advanced economies like the USA and Japan to China.It was also found that there were four factors that influence how video game was constructed in news and how the discourse changed:1)the development of game itself（as technology,as industry or as entertainment）;2)social comments;3)government policy;4)global economic order.These findings reflected the development of video games in the past 20 years in China as well as the transformation of social actors’cognition on related topics.The news discourse on video game represents the contemporary power structure and meanwhile challenges the existing knowledge system.This study verified the applicability of corpus-based method in news discourse study and called for a struggle of China to enhance its international discourse power in the field of video game. |
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